The Christchurch earthquake, and reading Terry Sturm, again brought to mind the importance of Lyttelton in Curnow’s biography, and its resonances in his poetry. So much of his work considers the tracking of time and its drum-beat conclusion, as it quarries threat and apprehension and self-defining; and builds on that cleared space of what Anglicanism had meant to him, and what its language continued to bear once doctrine lost purchase. I remember a story told to me by Fred Page, pianist and professor, brother of the famous cricketer ‘Curly’ Page. Fred was a schoolmate of Curnow’s in Lyttelton, where his father was a coal merchant. He recalled Allen’s early shame, when he once came to school without shoes. Rightly or wrongly, I cannot help but relate that anecdote to Curnow’s prickliness and pride, both inseparable from his qualities as a poet. Recent photographs of his father’s shattered church, and the fractured remains of ‘the time-ball’ tower which survive in the poetry, are vivid reminders of the boyhood world Curnow circled in numerous ways. The poems I call ‘Uninvited Tribute’ are a kind of hommage to a not altogether likeable man (I knew him only slightly), but our finest poet. I suspect he may have regarded anything so unrequested as an impertinence, especially as much of their imagery purposely derives from his own.